Getting into Prolog, again

I’ve been getting into with Prolog lately. I had not programmed prolog since university but I wanted to play with expert systems, and Prolog was even better than lisp for prototyping.

So, because all the Prolog papers I was reviewing were referencing Programming in Prolog by W. F. Clocksin and C. S. Mellish I bought an older (and cheap) edition to re-read. I was surprised how good the book is for learning to program in Prolog.

You can use the wonderful Learn Prolog Now! as a free introduction text, but Clocksin and Mellish chapters on grammar rules, debugging and laying out programs makes the book priceless.

And if you want to use prolog for ‘practical matters’ I strongly recommend Jan Wielemaker Ph. D. disertation: Logic programming for knowledge-intensive interactive applications. You’ll find a good overview about using Prolog outside the logic course: Web, multi-threaded, RDFs, literate programming, interfacing with object-oriented systems and interfacing with C for creating data storages.

Finally, If you come from the functional programming world, download Scrap Your Boilerplate—Prologically! a Prolog version of the Scrap Your Boilerplate set of papers. It is a great addition for learning Prolog if your background is functional.